Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Vintage Chair Week


Hi, Blog, remember me?

Earlier in the summer, back before the mosquitoes were aggressive enough to carry you away, or deplete your blood supply in a minute flat, I had the naive idea that I might want to entertain outside. And while we have a decent amount of mismatched chairs that could go outside, we didn't actually have a set designated for the outdoors.

Well, actually we still don't, exactly. Here's what happened in the mean time.

My allotted space for a patio is an 11' diameter gravel circle, surrounded by crape myrtles, hydrangeas, camellias, and ferns. All in all, not a bad spot. The bench already in place is a smallish teak Lutyens-style bench that I've had for years. The only problem is, I didn't particularly want to add more wood chairs, and didn't want the added formality of matching the Lutyens bench. I'm still working with the Cottage-meets-Deco theme here.

So I obsessed over outdoor chairs for a couple weeks, and couldn't quite come up with what I wanted, for the price I wanted (cheap!). Then the Ebay gods shined upon me, and I stumbled into an old favorite: a variation of the Marais chair. The original A chair was designed in 1934 by Xavier Pauchard. The story goes that 22 years later his son slimmed down the proportions, added arms, and renamed it the A56. Variations on the chair have been a staple of outdoor seating at French bistros ever since.

The pair that I found have a matte brown powder coat finish, although other brighter finishes are available through Pottery Barn, Design Within Reach. Or through Sundance, as pictured at the top of the post.

I'm very pleased with how the chairs, bench, and Smithy's old iron chess table work together without being at all matchy.

Mission accomplished.

2 comments:

Miss Janey said...

Perfect! Miss J does not miss the skeeters. They are a rare sight in SoCal. Of course, when she lived in FL and GA, they were a constant menace in the summertime.

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